Is witchcraft really on the rise?

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A study of magic in Britain since 1800 overstates its case but superstition lives on, says Robert Leigh-Pemberton

The “Swahili witch doctor”, installed in rooms “off the Edgware Road” by the War Ministry to cast spells on members of the Nazi high command, was no more than a fantasy in Evelyn Waugh’s bleakly comic Sword of Honour trilogy. Yet the last prosecution under the 1735 Witchcraft Act did in fact take place in 1944, amid a minor panic that the Scottish medium Helen Duncan had been revealing sensitive military information during seances.

Churchill described the prosecution as “tomfoolery” (Duncan was later unmasked as a fraud, with a particular talent for the manufacture of “ectoplasm” from cheesecloth, egg whites and lavatory paper), though such esoteric precautions are understandable during wartime. In any case, the practice and prosecution of witchcraft has persisted throughout the modern era. In 1838, for instance, an Essex woman was imprisoned for the boiling alive of her vicar’s cat, “with all due dread solemnities”. Most shocking (and upsetting) is the fact that the Met Police’s Project Violet, established in 2005 to investigate “belief-based child abuse” (often related to suspicions of witchcraft or “possession” in sub-Saharan immigrant communities), has seen a steady increase in the number of cases reported – 60 in the first 10 months of 2015 alone.

These stories are related in Thomas Waters’s Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times. Picking up in 1800, almost exactly where Keith Thomas’s masterful Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) left off, Waters contends that witchcraft, having suffered a decline, has been on the rise since the mid-20th century.

This part of his thesis is controversial. Yet there is little doubt that “magic”, in diverse forms, is deep-rooted in the British Isles, and once held absolute sway. In the medieval and early modern periods, Thomas suggested, even the rural clergy were merrily complicit in their parishioners’ superstitions. There are numerous 16th and 17th-century accounts of pets and farm animals being extended the sacrament of baptism as a charm for good health and fecundity.

Malevolent sorcery, too, was conducted within a largely Christian framework. In 1543 it was with a recited Paternoster and holy candle “dropt” upon the burnt “dung” of a “young maid named Elizabeth Celsay” that a witch of Canterbury, envious of Elizabeth’s youthful grace, sought to “make the cule [buttocks] of the said maid divide into two parts”. One cynical Elizabethan summed up the blurred lines between magic and faith with the axiom that the Pope “canonizeth the rich for saints and banneth the poor for witches”.

'Attempt to drown a supposed witch' from a newspaper report in 1876 Credit:
Fototeca Storica Nazionale

The growth of a more reasoned form of Christianity finally cut the occult adrift from faith, and condemned it to relative obscurity. But, as Waters demonstrates, this process was by no means total and it was certainly not sudden. Even in the brightest moments of the Enlightenment, a great deal hid in the shadows. Isaac Newton, for instance, conducted secret alchemical experiments throughout his life (John Maynard Keynes described him not as the first great scientist, but as the last great magician). “Cunning men” and “wise women”, the practitioners of “white magic” and defenders against curses, kept up a brisk trade until the 19th century. They provided a range of services to their communities – from curse-lifting, fortune-telling and “black magic” to practical and even medical advice (particularly in rural areas, where more scientific services could be hard to come by). George Pickingill, the “last cunning man in Essex”, lived until 1909.

By then, however, this venerable trade was leaning towards the ludicrous. Before his death in 1890, Billy Brewer, a cunning man of Somerset, was known for sporting an abundance of rings, a large grey wig and a sombrero.

What followed was a terminal decline in the older forms of witchcraft. The 20th-century revival of magic is a separate phenomenon – the product of a permissive society that no longer sees esoteric practices as actively dangerous. Modern witchcraft may, like the religion of Wicca (the only codified faith to originate in Britain, with 7,000 adherents at the 2001 census), claim archaic associations; but most historians who have taken an impartial look at the history of these movements agree that such claims are spurious. “Neo-paganism”, whose influences range from ecology to nudism, is a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

Waters, keen to demonstrate that magic has been more widespread than most historians acknowledge, does not always convince. He relies too heavily on isolated newspaper reports, without crediting their tendency to sensationalise (“Dracula authenticated,” declared the Western Morning News in 1930). His information is often presented in a slapdash fashion – endless lists of persecutions, prosecutions and accusations are laid out, but rarely analysed (the phrases “judged one critic” and “as one commentator observed” abound). “I went to see the cunning-man and he was very mysterious like,” one chapter begins, but we never learn who said these words.

Nonetheless, it is a bold step into very murky water. The amount of material Waters has unearthed is impressive, especially given the deliberate invisibility of witchcraft’s practitioners. His book is a salutary reminder that the modern world is not immune to superstition. As the Elizabethan theologian William Perkins pointed out: “We go to the physician for counsel, we take his recipe, but we know not what it meaneth; yet we use it, and find benefit… may we not as well take benefit by the wise man, whose courses we are ignorant of?”